Hi Chris,
You wrote:
(Alas, too often in this
list, "logician" is used pejoratively (and cluelessly) to connote
inflexibility, lack of "real world" experience, obsession with
minutiae, etc. (I do not mean to imply that you are so using it here.))
Personally, I don’t use the word
pejoratively (or cluefully). It is not pejorative to be a logician –
an academic and singularly mathematical viewpoint brings value to our
discussions. But you must realize that the symptoms you are recognizing,
specifically:
inflexibility,
lack of
"real world" experience,
obsession
with minutiae,
- etc.
might be real. We all have to
recognize our limitations. That is what fuels growth and change in our
character over a lifetime. Most of us who were professors at one time and
became practitioners later have had this experience of finding out that reality
is enormously more complicated and multifaceted than we thought back in an
academic setting, where the focus is deep, but not wide.
HTH,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Christopher Menzel
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2011
11:34 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum]
Ontology - System
On Jan 3, 2011, at 12:00 PM, John Bottoms wrote:
"Form and
Function" are the top level elements (Universals) for fashion and
industrial designers. They spend endless hours in discourse on this topic.
Yet it is solely the first level of their ontology. Thet have not
progressed much beyond that point since the Bauhaus movement in 1919 and
the indications are that this will continue.
I had thought that the way to start with ontology design would be to
fix the universals, but even that is not possible as Lakoff ("Fire
and Dangerous...") points out. If we must allow for alternate
universals then it appears that we are resigned to use one of the proposed
incomplete lattices, or to a set of universals that allow exceptions. An
alternate approach would be to provide associative links from a set
of references for universals that could be selected based on a context.
Exceptions (or other predicates) in universals may not be such a bad thing.
Intelligence has always used exceptions to provide coverage for widely varying,
real world situations, and exceptions are an under represented area of study
and representation. I know the logicians wouldn't like that approach, but I
believe it is possible using FOL.
It is no more meaningful to talk about what "logicians" would
or wouldn't like than it is to talk about what politicians, or Europeans, or
people with steady jobs would or wouldn't like. To be a logician is
simply to bring the clarity of mathematics to bear on the study of reasoning. In
fact, there are all kinds of logicians who study a wide variety of logics and
who exhibit a wide variety of views about logic and its applications.
(Alas, too often in this list, "logician" is used pejoratively
(and cluelessly) to connote inflexibility, lack of "real world"
experience, obsession with minutiae, etc. (I do not mean to imply that you are
so using it here.))
As for your point, I'm not entirely what you have in mind, but some of
it sounds a lot like the idea behind what those logician-types call non-monotonic
logic, which formalizes reasoning with default assumptions that can have
exceptions.